The Senate: Theater at theater’s best

As luck would have it, I happened to be on the Senate floor on university business on both of those two days, a couple of weeks apart, when Sen. Ping Lacson stood up to introduce us to the mysterious Mr. Pidal and his equally elusive associate Ms. Toh. Although my job requires occasional visits with politicians, I haven’t been to the Senate so often as these past few months, during which we’ve been shepherding Senate Bill 2587 (An act revising the 95-year-old UP Charter) through the legislative mill.

If you’ve never been there, take an afternoon off one of these days for a free lesson in Pinoy civics. Drive yourself or take a jeepney to the GSIS Complex in the reclamation area along Roxas Blvd., where the Senate holds office and conducts all those telenovela hearings and sessions you see on TV. If you’re decently dressed and promise not to stare any Senator down from where you’re sitting, you’ll be let into the gallery, along with any number of barangay councilmen, phlegmatic veterans, catatonic teenagers, and once and future warlords. Bring a jacket along, if you plan on staying for longer than 30 minutes; it’s mighty cold in there, and you never know when your bill will come up, given the senatorial propensity to "rise on a matter of personal and collective privilege," usually a prelude to some spirited mudslinging and the inevitable retort.

My UP colleagues and I were scheduled to attend another interpellation on the day Udong Mahusay appeared before the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee. Not surprisingly, the regular 3 p.m. session was delayed while Udong told his sad tale of cell phones and revenge. "You might want to watch the hearing," my Senate contact advised me. "Just look for where everybody is on the second floor." Two minutes later I was entering a huge carpeted hall, where everybody, indeed, seemed to be; the committee and its witnesses occupied the far side of the room, and before them was a mass of curious and credulous humanity, as if an alarm had been sounded for all of Manila’s bayside usiseros to assemble here for a worthy cause. A radio station’s reporters camped out at a corner table, to which they had staked their claim with a sign proclaiming "SA DZRH ‘TOH!"

The senators sat on a platform higher than everybody else; it was theater at theater’s best – or worst, depending on your persuasions. And, as in the theater, when all the ranting and recanting was done, everyone hurried home to a hot meal, forgetting much of the nuances of plot and character and remembering only the snappiest lines of the play. Go see it for yourself; playing until the end of the month.

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We should be moving soon to a nice old house on the UP campus in Diliman, but some repair and extension work needs to get done in the meanwhile. This has had us visiting hardware stores these past few weeks, looking over bathroom tiles, plumbing fixtures, and what the British call mod cons – 21th century life’s modern conveniences, of which we can never have too much.

A lunchtime hop to a sale at Cathay Builders on Commonwealth Ave. acquainted me, the other day, with the mind-boggling range of toilet bowls available on the market, costing anywhere from a pauperish P1,800 to a princely P39,000. The former is an old friend, warming me up every morning; the latter had to be the exemplar of excretory elegance, the Rolls-Royce of its genre, a sleek maroon machine with a sporty silver flush discreetly set to your lower right; no more awkward, muscle-maiming reaches behind you, no more getting up and turning around for visual confirmation of your dastardly deed before pulling the lever. (For P39,000, I’d have demanded a few more nifty features, but I’ll let it go at that.)

I must say I was sorely tempted; if only I’d had a good year, I might not have thought twice about splurging on, well, purging. I happen to belong to that school of thought that believes in spending extravagantly on things you personally use everyday – and if a toilet bowl doesn’t qualify for that category, I don’t know what will. (The true measure of wealth, David Ogilvy once said, was if you could bear to use a new razor blade every morning, tossing away the old one.) If I hadn’t blown my stash six months ago on a new laptop, why, I could’ve been sitting now in the very lap of luxury.

My dignity protected by my immaculate gusot-mayaman barong, I test-piloted a succession of models in the low four-figure range on the showroom floor, and settled on a reasonably bottom- and pocket-friendly piece. It’s nothing much to look at – but I guess that’s the point.

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I’m writing this in what has to be the biggest, swankiest hotel suite I’ve ever been in this country (which is also to say, in the whole wide world, since I can barely afford the acreage of a urinal in Paris or Tokyo). I’m in Tacloban, Leyte, in a cottage called Palompon 2, part of the Leyte Park Hotel complex put up 20 years ago by the Rose of Tacloban herself (whom, coincidentally, I saw at the Manila Peninsula lobby on Palanca awards night, presiding over a table of reluctant insomniacs).

When we were met in Tacloban airport by the hotel van, I thought it was my tough luck to get herded with a busload of teachers flying in to attend a national conference on literacy; tour groups and conventioneers take forever to get anywhere, with the shuttle having to wait for that one last joker who just has to take one last picture, and that one white-haired lady who always manages to mumble her way aboard the wrong bus. I imagined having to wait in line at the check-in counter while everyone’s room and roommate got sorted out. Worse, I was sure that I was going to get the leavings of the lodgings – some dinky room at the end of the hallway with a view of the trash heap and with enough nicotine and viler substances absorbed in the upholstery to occupy the Tacloban CSI for a full coup- and Edsa-free presidential term.

This was actually my third time in Tacloban and my second stay at the Leyte Park Hotel. (I bookmark my first trip to Leyte more than 25 years ago with the most inauspicious of memories – a casual wave at the airport to acquaintances flying ahead of us in their small plane, smack into a typhoon – the last that anyone would see of them alive.) It was in February last year when I crashed with two filmmakers in a room of the Leyte Park, on our way back from a sortie to Balangiga in Samar, across the bridge; a master of persuasion, my director-companion had sweet-talked the hotel management into yielding us a complimentary room, probably in exchange for a thank-you credit in our forthcoming (and still forthcoming) action movie, and as tight as the room was for three grown men and their dueling sinuses, we could hardly complain.

I was fully prepared to be reacquainted with this room – especially when I was made to pay, in advance, the room rate of P1,345.50, suspiciously cheap for the toniest hotel in town, if not the whole of Eastern Visayas – when the key-toting bellhop took my bags down the stairs and across the pool area to a row of native cottages along the waterfront. Again I imagined the door opening to my narrow slice of a triple-duplex affair, with a cot in a corner and an electric fan to dissuade all winged creatures from lingering too long on any one limb.

Instead I got this rajah’s suite, with two large beds (a clear waste of one-and-a-half of them), a walk-in closet, a pantry, and a toilet and bathroom capacious enough for a small circus and its elephants. Ah, suite charity. I kept expecting the roomboy to return and to announce sheepishly (or imperiously, as I might have) that "We made a mistake! We gave you the wrong room! Prepare to pay P10,000, or get out now!" It dawned on me that being with all those schoolmarms actually bought me an upgrade, all the regular rooms having been let out in the name of national literacy.

My suite was done in native style, with generous swaths of hardwood and woven fiber, but tastefully devoid of shell-speckled mirrors and macramé hangings. The only odd note was a clear-glass, curtain-less window on the pedestrian side of the bathroom, which looked out to a concrete wall with many holes – through which, it then occurred to me, the passerby could look in, to watch you scrubbing your armpits, or engrossed in FHM. (Not too abominable a prospect, if it were the likes of Juliana Palermo watching, or better yet being watched.) Necessity intervened, and modesty flew out the window; I perched in holy contemplation of the day ahead of me and of the sunny grass outside – but not without observing, with the smugness of newfound knowledge, that my porcelain throne and its royal flush would have cost me a cool five figures at Cathay Builders – and taken me straight to Uranus, with the right gearshift.

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And speaking of the UP Charter bill now in the Senate (here, whisper "Hidden agenda!"), it was with much dismay and some amusement that I read a letter published in another paper from the UP Student Regent and the Student Council chairman denouncing SB 2587 as a measure that would kill the university. The writers seemed to believe that passing SB 2587 will result in UP being totally abandoned by the government and devoured by private corporations.

The fact is that we’re merely seeking to augment our paltry salaries, improve our facilities, and keep our best and brightest by – among other things – generating more income from our resources. We will continue to fight for our fair share of the national budget for higher education, but we know from sad experience that it is unrealistic, if not fatal, to assume that we will get all that we need and ask for. SB 2587 gives UP a fighting chance. Nowhere does it contemplate privatizing the university, and making profitable use of university assets is vastly different from commercializing education or selling diplomas.

The best and surest way to kill UP is to junk this Charter bill and to wait another decade for a new measure to make it through the legislative mill – while hundreds more of our best professors leave for higher pay, while our laboratories and libraries rot, and while hordes of squatters take over our undeveloped property. The students objecting to this measure now won’t have to deal with the consequences five years hence – they’ll be out of UP and even possibly employed by the same private corporations they so blithely dismiss and malign. Those of us who have committed ourselves to a lifetime of teaching and service in UP, on the other hand, will be left to deal with the results of their myopic politicking.

Why should the university be made to suffer and pay for the shortcomings of the national government? If the bill’s opponents feel that the government has indeed abandoned its responsibilities to higher education, they should seek a change in those who make policy in government – and not gut UP from within, or kill it slowly through stagnation.

Thankfully – and contrary to the misimpression that all or most UP students are against the bill – the student councils of at least six large colleges in UP Diliman have signified their support for SB 2587, with minor modifications.

There’s hope yet that reason and good sense will prevail and keep UP alive as it approaches its centennial.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.